Too Much Awesome

I loved playing Monopoly when I was a kid. I liked all the money and little houses, but when I couldn’t convince my family to sit through hours of dice rolling, the game of Life was the next best thing.

It all started so simply. I was browsing the board game isle of my local Fred Meyers last week when I stumbled on a blast from my past. Just seeing it immediately got my mind to start moving, which is odd because as a kid, it barely made me think at all. Milton Bradley pioneered [...]

Few games take advantage of an overactive vocabulary the way Scrabble does. In fact, Scrabble is all about knowing difficult words in the hopes of showing up your family with a massive triple word score for something with a Z in it. Apparently, Scrabble is also the proud owner of a sordid past, but let’s [...]

Settlers of Catan is the grand daddy of modern strategy board games.  Originally published in Germany in 1995, Settlers of Catan has now been translated into 30 languages, and shows no sign of losing steam. Over 15 million copies of the game have been sold, and it is currently in its 4th edition. The game [...]

Rudi Hoffman died yesterday at the age of 83. Many English-speakers gamers don’t know Hoffman’s name, but they probably know his work: he designed top European games such as Café International, Maestro, Tally Ho!, Crocodile Pool Party, and Up the Creek. Hoffman’s designs have been copycatted so many times in the last thirty years that [...]